Mick Hartley

Sarah Ditum at UnHerd on the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS):

It’s not uncommon for women to be badly served by medicine in this way, given that women are neglected as research subjects. Historically, femaleness has been treated as an abnormality, to be ignored if it cannot be remedied. What’s exceptional about the GIDS case, though, is that the underlying philosophy of trans identity effectively made these girls doubly invisible. They were invisible, firstly, to a model that had never taken them into account. But secondly, and more profoundly, they were invisible because gender identity doctrine held that even to think of them as female was to “misgender” them. You couldn’t say how they were different to boys without conceding that they were not, in strict fact, boys.

But to hate your body as a teenage girl is one of the most categorically female experiences possible. I didn’t hate my body because I wasn’t a girl; I hated it precisely because I was, and because of everything I feared or knew that being a woman might mean.

Trans activists tend to dismiss stories like mine: if I had truly been dysphoric, they say, I would never have grown up to be the basic bitch I am today. I would have found a way to transition. But if I’d had YouTube, Mermaids and a compliant medical service, the way would have been signposted for me in neon lights. I learned to live with my body, in time, because no one gave me an alternative.

One of the many reasons that the “pause button” claim about blockers is a lie is that going through puberty is one of the ways you become reconciled to puberty. Discovering your sexuality might help you discover that your body exists for your pleasure, not just external judgement. Gradually, the alien flesh can become familiar again. The girls who went through GIDS were denied this. Taking puberty blockers means you never reach adult sexual function. Tentative research suggests that girls who went on blockers actually felt worse about their bodies after several years. Blockers didn’t treat their dysphoria: they exacerbated it….

The things these women did in an effort to become not-girls remind me so keenly of the girl I used to be, with her vague longing for a bodiless life. A perverse sisterhood of doomed escapologists, looking for a get-out from what biology had planned for us. The way I once felt about myself was terrible, but it was also normal: the terribly normal fact of feminine self-loathing. The tragedy of a misogynistic world is that it makes girls believe they need a cure for femaleness. The scandal of GIDS is that it pretended it could supply one.